The Explainability of Experience: Realism and Subjectivity in Spinoza's Theory of the Human Mind

"Yes, she’s our contemporary. Her book, The Explainability of Experience , was originally published in German. A translation came out a couple of years ago and we should be really grateful for that. On the face of it her theme is narrow: does Spinoza offer us an explanation for our experience of the world? But, in pursuing that thesis across various topics in the Ethics , she offers us a very broad vision of Spinoza’s system, which I think is the right one: that Spinoza was both a rationalist and a realist. By rationalist, I don’t mean—and she doesn’t mean—this caricature of somebody who thinks that you can come to all knowledge deductively with reason, but that, for a moral rationalist, well-being, human flourishing and happiness are a matter of living a life according to the guidance of reason. So, in her reading, Spinoza is a rationalist both about knowledge and about ethics. “Spinoza gets more and more difficult every time you read him because new questions emerge, and you notice things you didn’t notice before” But she also argues he’s realist. Here, she’s combating a certain interpretation of Spinoza that goes all the way back to Hegel , that for Spinoza the only thing that’s really real is God, or nature itself, and all the finite things around us are merely subjective phenomena by which we try to understand or make sense of nature. She says that Spinoza really did believe that the world around us is real and there are finite durational things and that the basic metaphysical and epistemological grounds for our knowledge of them requires their reality. So, I think her book is a nice counter to subjectivist readings of Spinoza’s metaphysics. It’s a kind of Parmenidean theory that the only thing that’s real is ‘the one’, ‘the whole’—in Spinoza’s terms, ‘God’ or ‘nature’. We seem to see around us items in nature that have metaphysical integrity—tables, chairs, trees, giraffes. Are these things real things that exist as durational beings—although they’re part of nature and everything is a part of nature—or is the breaking up of nature into discrete individuals illusory?"